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Comment by rambambram | Hacker News Reader

Youtube must know better than me what to recommend me out of all the videos... still, I get presented the same shite again and again.

To be fair: not everything is shite and Youtube is my favorite social media (especially for discovering new music), but I noticed a big drop in quality videos from one day to the other a couple of years ago. Just opening up Youtube one day and seeing all kinds of thumbnails with people with their mouth open, very 'colory' thumbnails (more childlike), channels that I would never watch being presented... I should have noted the exact date, but I didn't. I guess it was around two years ago.

Even searching for specific topics is hard. I just know there's enough material on the platform, but in my search results I get so many doubles and channels that I already know. I can keep scrolling, but to no result.

If anybody knows some good DIY or woodworking channels, let me know!

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Agreed. It painfully overfits based on what I've watched. I've watched thousands of videos and it still doesn't understand me at all because it appears to treat every action as equal. As an example, I like watching the Starcraft II streamer uThermal but I'm not really interested in other Starcraft II content creators because uThermal scratches that itch. However YouTube will keep showing me Starcraft II content creators that I am not subbed to and whose content I will never watch.

Of the 30 videos currently proposed to be on front page I'd consider watching maybe 4 of them. To be honest I'm a big fan of the change they made to occasionally show new content because it actually provides some novelty (one of those 4 is of a video from a creator with only 19 subscribers).

The worst is that if you're someone who enjoys multiple niche things and who also interacts with the algorithm (like - dislike - not interested) your account gets marked as content discovery vanguard and it will endlessly feed you videos with <1000 views just so they can get more feelers on if the content is actually good.

Even if you consistently "not interested", the algorithm never ever figures out the overlapping theme is that you (generally) don't like low view count low subscriber count content.

As a fellow uThermal enjoyer, I have to admit the algorithm knew enough to suggest him to me if I was watching battlecruiser cheese.

I just wish they'd recognize that the fifty-first time I don't watch a video they should find something else to show me.

Ahh a fellow Mr Guy <3.

(I just wanted to use Mr Guy in a sentence once in my life)

Isn't your first parapraph an example of YouTube's algorithm underfitting though?

I find it painfully overfits time of day. I get the same investment themed videos late at night on autoplay.

Youtube's front page is terrible:

- Of the topmost 4 videos I would consider watching one because I am already subscribed to the channel and even have the particular video in Watch Later (so what's the point?)

- Shorts appearing again and again after I explicitly remove them, taking up valuable space

- Below some random videos half of which I am already subscribed to so I can see them in Subscriptions - no need for duplicates

- The other half in large part is of doomerism, although I don't watch that content

Their last video search changes have been the worst thing they've ever done, I can never find anything I actually search for, its pretty obvious its to shove ad stuffed videos in your face, and hide old videos they cannot monetize, but holy crap. There's even some youtube channels where both the video and audio I used to listen to is completely FUBAR'd so somewhere in YouTubes infra, old videos are hinging on a hard drive that's dying in production.

>hide old videos they cannot monetize

All videos are monetized. Some videos don't do rev share with the author, but YouTube still gets the ad rev.

Demonetized videos show fewer or no ads. It's something they implemented because advertisers don't want to be associated with some kinds of content.

I think at this point all videos have ads. Demonized videos not having ads hasn't been a thing for what feels like years.

Demonetized

Big brands don't pay the big bucks to buy placements on run-of-network channels (ie. small random channels).

The videos in question are niche as heck, maybe 400 people would recognize them, if even, old 2000s forum parody song of other forum members, out of how many billions online? So yeah, ultra random channel from 2009.

The recommended videos next to the current video and generally awful now. But my YouTube usage almost exclusively starts on the first row of videos they show when I'm logged in. They're almost entirely recent uploads from the channels I subscribe to and what most often. I subscribe to too many channels to keep up on the full feed of uploaded, but YouTube seems to do a good job highlighting the subscriptions I'm most interested in.

Admittedly, I rarely "browse" YouTube looking for new things. I typically find new channels either from other sources (reddit, Twitter, etc.) or because one channel mentions another channel.

Now that you mention it. First row is usually best for new interesting videos. After that, I usually click on the subscriptions page and discover some new interesting stuff from the last couple of days.

> If anybody knows some good DIY or woodworking channels, let me know!

A woodworker and former RIM engineer -- if you don't already know his channel: https://www.youtube.com/@Matthiaswandel

Thanks! Familiar face, I have seen videos from him.

Now I have to give one back... Maybe you don't know Marius Hornberger, I really enjoy his maker videos.

They're hard to find! Typically you get either:

- Some screwing into end grain. Looks good on camera but it's complete junk.

- A 'hobbyist' with a commercial workshop worth tens of thousands of dollars making it look easy.

>Even searching for specific topics is hard.

It's the tyranny of the marginal user. How I wish YouTube (and generally other platforms for user-generated content) would have fine-grained search and filtering controls that let me specify exactly what I want, no recommendation algorithm trying to guess what I actually meant. But such a feature won't attract and retain the least interested people, so we'll never get it.

> Youtube must know better than me what to recommend me out of all the videos... still, I get presented the same shite again and again.

Either I'm doing something very right, or everyone else is doing something very wrong, because my front page of YouTube is fine.

Most of my front page is videos about games I play or have played (Factorio, Arc Raiders, Cyberpunk 2077, Cities: Skylines, and more), dash cam compilations (Which I watch a lot of), and various videos from channels I'm subscribed to such as Kurzgesagt, Chubbyemu, ElectroBOOM, LockPickingLawyer, Engineering Explained, Veritasium (Just discovered Newcomb's Problem and I'm a solid one-boxer) and more.

I never see Mr Beast or any of the other channels people complain about recommended to me. Every recommendation is relevant. YouTube knows me well.

Somehow, it just seems some people use YouTube in such a way that YouTube can't figure out what you like, and so you just get a default recommendation.

It's a constant job on my side, but asking the algorithm to not show me this trash channel seems to be working for me.

As soon as I see a clickbait thumbnail/title, I ask to not show it anymore.

On a daily basis I get 90% of interesting content on the home page.

It particularly works great for music; now I get better recommendations from YouTube than from Spotify (which is my main music platform).

> If anybody knows some good DIY or woodworking channels, let me know!

There are dozens of great channels in those spaces. Here are some I remember just off the top of my head.

* Cars: Watch Wes Work (need 1.5x speed here!), Prop Department, Mat Armstrong, Chris Fix

* Woodworking: Frank Howarth, Matthias Wandel, The Wood Whisperer, John Heisz, Steve Ramsey

* Metalworking: Clickspring, Cronova Engineering, Tubal Cain

* General DIY/inventions: DIY Perks, Uri Tuchman, Stuff Made Here, Colin Furze, Applied Science, Breaking Taps

I think it's actually not too bad at surfacing this stuff. They also have a "New to You" button you can click.

My main complaint is it will recommend a specific video to you for aaaages without you clicking on it before it finally realises you aren't interested. You can manually say you aren't interested, but it's two clicks and you shouldn't need to do that anyway.

Thanks! I know a couple of 'em, will check the rest.

Indeed not hard to surface, but a handful of channels is a drop in the ocean of all the videos that must have been uploaded and are at least nice to watch and informative. Sometimes I get these rare gems inside my recommendations; a small channel with a couple of very interesting videos, maybe not the best or slickest productions, but definitely of interest. I guess the algo strongly favors a regular upload rhythm.

I can subscribe to these channels, but I can't even find them in my subscriptions. There's no overview, and sometimes I subscribe to channels that I know I already subscribed to (the channels themselves also experienced this unsubscribing behavior and made this known in their videos).

> My main complaint is it will recommend a specific video to you for aaaages without you clicking on it before it finally realises you aren't interested. You can manually say you aren't interested, but it's two clicks and you shouldn't need to do that anyway.

Completely agree!

> I can subscribe to these channels, but I can't even find them in my subscriptions. There's no overview

You can just click "subscriptions" on the left to only show videos from channels you are subscribed to, and then there's another button somewhere to show a list of your subscriptions.

> a handful of channels is a drop in the ocean of all the videos that must have been uploaded and are at least nice to watch and informative

It wasn't an exhaustive list!

> If anybody knows some good DIY or woodworking channels, let me know!

Check out Peter Millard.

The YouTube home screen is a total wasteland. It's a disaster. It's a horrific attention suck that's done enormous damage to humanity's collective attention span. Recommendations are barely any better - sometimes they're loosely connected to the video you just watched, but other times it's just more weird addicting YouTube slop.

At the same time, YouTube is an incredible resources; a civilizational achievement. It's a library of an enormous amount of knowledge, often presented in an engaging manner and well summarized. You can learn an enormous amount of things on YouTube.

I wish we could have one without the other, but all those videos servers don't pay for themselves, and the good stuff doesn't come without an enormous amount of subpar video content, and the stuff that pays is rarely the most useful.

I try to never engage with recommendations or the home screen, but it's hard especially when I'm tired or otherwise low on willpower.

Ideally I could get a YouTube app that's just a search box and can handle links that I click from other sources. I don't know if that exists and if it does, Google has a strong incentive to shut it down.

> The YouTube home screen is a total wasteland. It's a disaster. It's a > horrific attention suck that's done enormous damage to humanity's > collective attention span. Recommendations are barely any better - > sometimes they're loosely connected to the video you just watched, > but other times it's just more weird addicting YouTube slop.

I rarely ever open anything else but https://www.youtube.com/feed/subscriptions

Check out the Unhook extension (available in various browsers), it can turn YT into search box + video player.

That's perfect and it doesn't request unnecessary permissions - it only wants access to youtube.com. Thanks!

I stopped having that issue when I was subscribed to the pages I enjoyed watching and watched that content. Without that its just going to throw you random popular content.

my personal recommendation is to browse from new personality (aka, log out and clean cookies or privite session I guess)

you'd be surprised both how different recommendations can be, and how fast algorithm recognizes that it is you and starts giving all the same stuff again

but still, that's the best way of discovering new things that I've found

> all kinds of thumbnails with people with their mouth open, very 'colory' thumbnails (more childlike)

What is with the thumbnails?!? I mean, I know what's with them- content makers have found a technique that works, and are beating that dead horse until it stops coughing up money. [1]

I guess my question is- what is with the median Youtube viewer? Are they just completely governed by their id? Does it not register that they're falling for the same bait every single time? That would bother me, but if people realize they're being manipulated and are fine with it, I guess that makes me the old man yelling at clouds. Oh well, I've been called worse.

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QCVGpvzcHko

I noticed that the Shorts pedaling is causing a major deterioration of the service and it started a few years ago.

At some point I looked too long at a thirst trap and now all I get is OF girls jumping on trampolines and stuff like that, despite spending literal days of time on longer form content for every second I've glanced at that stuff. They just really want me to interact with their Shorts doomscroll. It certainly has the scent of enshitification since Shorts.

I can't use YT without anti shorts:

https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/441709-youtube-anti-shorts

ishitani

> Youtube must know better than me what to recommend me out of all the videos... still, I get presented the same shite again and again.

Yep, for some reasons the recommendation engines seem to have become “oh you glanced at this post for 2 second or you watched a single video, this must be exclusively what you want”

I’ve seen it on social media too, notably Facebook.

Spotify sucks too with this. Theres certain artists where if I create a radio station from a song/album or whatever, I will know what like 20 of those songs in that generated station will be. Maybe 8-15 artists and the same 1-3 songs they pick from that artist for that given sort of radio generated call. The feature is good for a toe dip into discovery but you hit the bottom of its depth almost immediately. Sometimes it changes the generated playlist, but hardly. Feels way more siloed than actual FM radio. I might have to start building my own playlists again and do old fashioned discovery, which was almost a part time job evaluating discographies and studying genre history.

Yup, that's exactly the youtube problem. It's really terrible for finding new interesting things. If you don't already know exactly what you want to watch, you'll never discover something new you might like.

>Yep, for some reasons the recommendation engines seem to have become “oh you glanced at this post for 2 second or you watched a single video, this must be exclusively what you want”

Worse than that, at times my home page feed has been 5-10% "Here's a video you've already watched all the way through. Want to watch it again?" recommendations. Like YT can see I've watched the video - why are so many videos I've watched being "recommended" for me?

Oh man, I think I had a subscription to HBO through YouTube

Then HBO did a machine gun fire of price increases so I cancelled.

For the next few weeks every single YouTube recommended video was an HBO show/movie.

It optimizes for binging. Most people watch one channels content as a single session letting autoplay take over. So if they think you are now on a new channel, they will show that channels videos.

If you scroll down on suggested videos after watching something, it is pretty easy to see how it works. Just keep scrolling and eventually it does start to cycle in a loop of only a few unique options.

Youtube records hovering over their stupid Tiktoks as a view - if you go into view history you can delete all of them and get better recommends.

curate your watch history a little bit

This doesnt help. Youtube is weird. On one hand, the majority of watch time is Beast brain rot like content but on the other hand, there is genuinely amazing creativity happening. The issue is discovery.

Youtube cannot help with discovery because it does not increase watch time. It is far more likely that an autoplay of a “safe known” video will be watched then something new.

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